“What do I have to do to put this into effect? Do I just sign it?” Trump demanded. “Do I have to put it on letterhead?”

“How long have you been working on this?” another staffer asked the young lawyer.

“No, no, I just got it from—” Gaiser said with mounting panic, indicating the president. “I never saw it.” Plaintively, he asked the president or, broadly, anyone, “Don’t we have to run it by Pat?”

“Molly,” Trump called to his assistant. “Get Pat down here.”

Cipollone arrived seconds later, out of breath.

“I’m sitting here with my new lawyer, Pat,” said Trump, with a pointed smirk, although others in the room surmised that he didn’t know Gaiser’s name.

The now-terrified young lawyer passed Trump’s executive order to the White House counsel. Cipollone, himself confused and, as always, in panic mode, seemed to snatch the paper away and then, with a hurried excuse, withdrew, taking it with him for further study.

In other words, the effective status of one of the most complex and resource-demanding legal challenges perhaps in U.S. history continued to be that no one was really in charge—and the president was crowd-sourcing his own legal work. The suspicion was that the executive order now being passed, like a hot potato, around the Oval Office was the handiwork of Kurt Olsen, one of the growing number of right-wing conspiracy-minded lawyers vying for the president’s attention. The effort was ad hoc, free-floating, decentralized, on the fly, and an open invitation for anyone with a grievance or a hopeful personal agenda to join in—and send along their own legal theories.

In this, the shark had already been jumped by Sidney Powell.

Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, always pleased to undermine his Fox colleague Sean Hannity (who had relentlessly championed Powell) and miffed that among the dead voters on the list supplied by the campaign, which the Carlson show had scrolled through on the air, a number had turned out to be alive, went after Powell on November 19 after the hair dye press conference earlier in the day. She was portrayed as a grifter and fantasist.

Then, on the twenty-first, Powell went on Newsmax to accuse Georgia Republican governor Brian Kemp, still at this point allied with the White House, of being a key agent in the Dominion–Hugo Chavez–George Soros conspiracy. (Curiously, the show was hosted, in a downward spiral of political fortunes and a world of reverse respectability, by the former network news political heavyweight and presidential campaign chronicler Mark Halperin, caught out in his own #MeToo disgrace and reduced to the media fringe.)

On November 22, a reluctant Trump, otherwise defending her for her “fight,” agreed that they might need some distancing from Powell. Hence, she was now designated an “independent lawyer,” not acting as a lawyer for the president.

External validation was, to say the least, hard to come by—and yet the president found it.